Inside LINK is a weekly column from our CEO, Lacy Starling. If you have questions you’d like Lacy to answer, email her at lacy@linknky.com.
Back in 2015, my mother had a minor stroke. She showed up at my office, face drooping, slurring her words, and generally scaring me to death. I rushed her to St. Elizabeth’s emergency room, which was thankfully just down the street from where I worked. Within minutes, she was taken back to a room, hooked up to any number of monitoring devices, and seen by a neurologist.
The speed with which she was treated astonished me—most trips to the ER involve painfully long waits, sitting in uncomfortable chairs, being scared and in pain, and frustrated as you watch other folks get taken back before you.
But that’s the beauty of triage. Ask any ER doctor or nurse, and they’ll tell you: there’s an order to how patients are seen. Ambulance cases are first, then anyone walking in with cardiac or neurological symptoms, then the broken arms and people who cut themselves trying to saw the end off a garden hose. The ER staff is going to treat the life-threatening conditions first, because if they just did first-come, first-served, the woman having a heart attack would die while they were stitching your finger, but you won’t die of a finger cut while they save her life.
Newsrooms work the same way, just with fewer bodily fluids. (Thank goodness—there’s a reason I didn’t go into medicine.)
Every day, news happens, and the people reporting on it are making split-second decisions about what is important, and what can wait. Reporters are constantly being asked to drop what they had planned to write for the day, to cover an accident or a shooting, or a breaking political news story, and that often means that fewer time-sensitive stories get covered later.
Our editorial team takes a look at everything coming through our email and across the emergency scanners, and what we know is happening in the community, and decides to cover what’s most important to the largest number of people—to do the most for the most, in other words.
And just like for the person sitting in the ER with a nasty gash on their finger watching other people get help before them, the knowledge that breaking news gets covered first can be cold comfort for someone with a story to tell, or news happening in their own neighborhood. No one wants to be in pain, and no one wants a story they think is important to go untold.
What I would say to those folks watching other stories get told first: we see you. Just like the ER nurses aren’t going to turn off the lights and go home with someone sitting in the waiting room, we won’t forget about the stories we’ve had to pause to work on breaking news. We’ll get back to them. And as we raise the money to hire more reporting staff, we’ll be able to tell even more of them.
To push this analogy to the limit, eventually, instead of our entire team working in our “ER” covering breaking news, we’ll be able to have specialists working on different kinds of reporting—features and investigative reports and human-interest stories—and that means many more stories will get told.
It just takes time and resources to be able to do that, both of which we are working hard to create right now. (If someone can tell me how to create more time, I’m happy to take that meeting.)
And while I know you can’t give us more time in the day, if you’d like to support the work we are doing so we can hire more reporters to tell these stories, you can, right here.
